The Tsai Gov’t Has Turned the "National Team" into “False Friends Team”

 The Tsai Gov’t Has Turned the "National Team" into “False Friends Team”

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

March 4, 2019

 Translation of an Excerpt

Since the Tsai government came to office, it started to organize "national teams" for various industries, springing up everywhere like flowers, from semiconductors, national defense, wind power generation to movies-TV industries, everything being included. It seems that once being crowned with the title "national," it could suddenly become all-powerful, conquering all difficulties. The latest to be set up is “Agricultural Products Export Platform," which the Council of Agriculture (COA) claimed would use the concept of "national team" to help farmers secure orders, immediately eliciting heavy criticisms from Han Kuo-yu, who said, "it’s a crazy idea." The squabbling this time accidentally led Mitagri Co. (The Taiwan Agricultural Products Development Corporation), which had been dormant for quite some time, to suddenly become the talk of the town, and also unveiled a scar of the COA.

Mitagri was established with great fanfare over two years ago; Tsai Ing-wen even wrote on her Facebook page: “Mitagri is the ‘national team’ for Taiwan’s agriculture industry, shipping Taiwan’s farm produce, such as guavas, mangos, pineapples, bananas... to the shelves of the entire world.” Setting up Mitagri was a major agricultural plank during Tsai Ing-wen’s presidential campaign; the man who drafted her "Agricultural Policy White Paper" was precisely Chen Chi-chung, the current Minister of the Council of Agriculture. While he was still Deputy Minister of the Council of Agriculture, in order to plan and organize Mitagri, Chen once concurrently served as chairman of Taiwan Fertilizer Corp.

Mitagri grabs planting, logistics, and marketing, arousing panic among farmers. Under such circumstances, farmers and traders consider Mitagri as competitors rather than partners; Mitagri has from the very beginning found it difficult to gain farmers’ trrust, and precisely because of this, has produced no report card, burning through one-third of the capitalization in a short two years because of losses.

Recently, Han Kuo-yu questioned that Mitagri had spent NT$1 billion, yet with little to show, saying it owned the strong support of state resources and policies, but the result was a disastrous failure. Chen Chi-chung surprisingly defended himself with the "approach of spiritual victory" saying Mitagri “luckily did not make money," otherwise, it would have been questioned for making money at the expense of farmers. Such unctuous and nonsensical sophistry completely proved his incompetence.

Mitagri’s failure reflected the Tsai government’s inkling for pomposity and inconsistency in words and deeds. When the government sets up national teams, it should clearly understand their goals and roles, not being naïve throughout. If the government could only resort to sloganeering, putting on shows, arranging cronies as staff, while the result was, however, squandering money, then nothing could be accomplished

Judging from the mentality of Chen Chi-chung, who claimed that Mitagri “luckily did not make money," this corporation should really be closed down, and the outside world needed not give it any expectations. Especially, Chen Chi-chung, who used all the way satirical language against Han Kuo-yu, did he truly believe that the agricultural products and farm produce were achievements due to his enlightened leadership?

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